Discovery of remains stirs Native community

BOSTON — As a citizen of the Quapaw Nation, Ahnili Johnson-Jennings has always seen Dartmouth College as the university for Native American students.

Her father graduated from the school, founded in 1769 to educate Native Americans, and she had come to rely on its network of students, professors and administrators. But news in March that the Ivy League school in New Hampshire found partial skeletal remains of 15 Native Americans in one of its collections has Johnson-Jennings and others reassessing that relationship.

"It's hard to reconcile. It's hard to see the college in this old way where they were taking Native remains and using them for their own benefit," said Johnson-Jennings, a senior and co-president of Native Americans at Dartmouth. The remains were used to teach a class as recently as last year, just before an audit concluded they had been wrongly cataloged as not Native.

"It was very upsetting to hear, especially when you've just felt so supported by a school and they've had that secret that maybe no one knew about, but still, to some sense, was a secret," Johnson-Jennings said, describing a March meeting where Native American students were briefed on the discovery.

Dartmouth is among a growing list of universities, museums and other institutions wrestling with how best to handle Native American remains and artifacts in their collections and grappling with what these discoveries say about their past policies regarding Native communities.

For Native tribes, the loss of the remains and cultural items caused significant pain. The remains, most believe, are imbued with the spirit of the ancestor to whom they belong and are connected to living citizens of those tribes.

They could go to court or negotiate with an institution for them to be repatriated. But it wasn't until the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, in 1990 that a process was created for their return.

'Moving too slowly'

Critics complain that many institutions move too slowly in repatriating remains and funerary items once they're discovered in their collections, often hiding behind a loophole in NAGPRA that allows them to label remains as culturally unidentifiable. That puts the burden on tribes to prove the remains are their ancestors, an expense many can't afford.

Some 884,000 Native American artifacts — including nearly 102,000 human remains — that should be returned to tribes under federal law are still in the possession of colleges, museums and other institutions across the country, according to data maintained by the National Park Service.

The University of California, Berkeley tops the list, according to the Park Service.

Shannon O'Loughlin, chief executive of the Association on American Indian Affairs, called the practice racist. "It just says that they value the idea of Native Americans as specimens more than they do as human beings," said O'Loughlin, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

Agencies Via Xinhua